"Time and Tide Wait for No Man"

I had an interesting time trying to find out who first said that.  Answers.com attributes it to Chaucer in 1390, although I think it's a bit of a reach:

For thogh we slepe or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the tyme; it nil no [will no] man abyde.
[c 1390 Chaucer Clerk's Tale l. 118]

I think it's more like this quote from 1592

Tyde nor time tarrieth no man.
[1592 R. Greene Disputation between He Cony-catcher & She Cony-catcher X. 241]

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that we spent the morning fishing the outgoing tide at Sebastian Inlet, a state park on the East Coast of Florida, not too far from the Silicon Swamp.  (Occasionally really nice pictures here.)  We were up before 5 this morning to be on the water at sunrise because time and tide...  Possibly.  By the clock we were, but you couldn't prove it looking for the sun.  Today was one of those rare days around here with really dense fog - so dense it was hard to tell if the sun was up; so dense it was hard to find markers and stay in safe water until we got into the channel.  Sebastian is a rough inlet, and I definitely don't have a boat safe enough to run it when it's nasty - and it's nastiest on the outgoing tide when the winds are strong out of the east or when big swells from far away storms are bucking the tide.  When these things happen, the inlet gets large standing waves; a set of breakers that stay in the same place for a couple of hours.  I've seen 25 to 30' foot boats almost roll in there.   But it's pretty safe on the inside, and well sheltered from the winds.   

 

By the time I grabbed this picture, the fog had mostly lifted and it was possible to see around.  The sun eventually burned off the fog and turned it into a normal day.  What we were doing there was drifting the inlet channel casting artificials: jigs and plugs. There's always a small fleet of boats in the inlet drifting in the strong current and doing the same thing.  The current runs several knots so we drift from the west end almost to the bridge (a few hundred yards from the mouth of the inlet) then run back inside and start over.  It wasn't much of a fishing trip, we each caught one jack crevalle of about one pound.  As the day wore on, we switched from rain jackets to shirt sleeves and it ended up about 80 by the time we left.  Just a little sunburned. 

The trip to the inlet adds about an hour and a half getting there and back, with around another hour or so cleaning up, but today added even more time.  It was time to change the oil in the outboard, and a bit more oil hit the garage floor than should have leading to more time in cleanup.  Pretty much shot the day.